Hourglass
by EnchanteRhea
Summary: "I took life for granted, thinking all it took to survive was to grab my hourglass and run to stop it from being turned upside down." Watari-centric, weird little fic I wrote a long time ago. Please enjoy.


**Note:** This might be one of the strangest fic I've ever written, and a very old one - from 2005, never published on FFNet before. I've been away from the fandom for some years, but I've seriously missed it. The story is very loosely based on the other Yami fic I was writing back in the day, so a forewarning to readers not familiar with any of my old stuff: my Watari tends to go dark on me. ;)

**The music:**  
Savatage - _Exit Music_

**Hourglass**  
by Rhea Logan

There is a box in my apartment where I rarely go, and even less often sleep, under my desk and a generous layer of dust. It's been decades since the last time its lid went up, though I've held it in my hands more times than I care to count. There were things I fought over to take with me when I died; not because I was sentimental like that, but because the lack of sentimentalism that shaped me suddenly turned scary and I began to fear I would lose the memory of everything that mattered, once.

There's a picture there, ragged edges and all, worn from a child's damp hands – my hands – smiling faces and, though the colors have faded, I still remember the shirt my mother gave me was the lightest shade of green. Then there is a pair of gloves - thin, once jet black fabric, now washed out. I'd put them away along with my career and moved on to a less hectic sort of 'life'. Figure of speech, that's all it is, but it serves all right.

Life was just a word, I remember telling myself when I died. What mattered was not who I was, but what I did, and how.

There's an hourglass, too, in the box; a reminder of how we pass along with time, of how we wear thin and die. The cycle begins all over again when you turn it upside down, and so does that of life – first you're born, but you die, and then you're born again. And you strive to make up for your mistakes even though there is no conscious memory of them to cling to in your mind.

But it's never the same, I was told, and then the camera snapped to give me a fading memory of a happy life. No grain of sand ever falls the same way twice. No line or pattern is ever the same; drawn by coincidence, for those who believe in it, or by your own hand, each time the cycle begins there is a grand set of new variables shaping who you are. And even that moment when I held my parents' hands, as a child, never happened again. Never the same way, even when I took pictures to prove otherwise.

There is a red ribbon, among other things; wrapped around a piece of paper rendered yellow by time. A now-useless testimony to the twenty four years of my life. It says who I am, or who I was, and what I had achieved in my time. What it doesn't say is that I wasn't any less blind than I am right now. Taking life for granted, thinking all it took to survive was to grab my hourglass and run to stop it from being turned upside down.

There is always more that keeps me here, another grain of sand worth picking up, and yet I wouldn't think twice if I had to flip your hourglass because your time was up. There's some irony in this, in how I cling to my soul that wouldn't rest and my body that won't die. I'm still here – how many times did someone try to flip my hourglass?

You tend to lose the track of time when you see yourself, but there's no visible change to tell you how many years have passed since you were alive. Perhaps you feel the change in how those years weigh down on your mind, but who would spare it much thought when there's still so much you can do with your time? I never stopped to look back, until the decades of carefully woven existence began to fall apart and, for the first time, it got through to me that nothing, not even the so-called afterlife, would last. We are not immortal; we are ghosts that serve one purpose, not our own, and live on borrowed time.

These days, I stop to think every time I catch the sight, in passing, of something each of them left behind. They still live within these walls, as long as I'm here to remember their names, their faces, and what they hid in their hearts. I once told myself it only hurt like this the first time. Except that it was the "first time" with each next turned hourglass, until they were all gone and I was left to watch the helpless grains of sand in my own, now lonely, one.

I put my hourglass away, years later, before the trails of treacherous sand could lead me too far off the beaten track. It lies on the side; an illusion of power over the passing of time.

December 16th, 2005


End file.
